


saltlick

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [52]
Category: Dark Places - Gillian Flynn
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Established Relationship, F/M, Kleptomania, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22831516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: It was a Saturday afternoon and Lyle Wirth stood over my sink pouring salt and pepper down the drain.
Relationships: Libby Day/Lyle Wirth (Dark Places)
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [52]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 26
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	saltlick

**Author's Note:**

> 052/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt # 25 – salt.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Lyle Wirth stood over my sink pouring salt and pepper down the drain. 

I sat on the counter next to him watching him do it while mentally stomping down on the panicky urge that nestled somewhere between my chest and my mouth that screamed at me to stop him, stop him now, stop him  _ right  _ now the whole time.

Mostly, my stomping worked. 

I did not rip the basic, square-shaped glass salt shaker out of Lyle’s hands like someone else might rip their panties out of the hands of a burglar they’d caught in their home, wrist deep in their undies drawer. I didn’t snatch it when he picked it up out of the box it was in with a few dozen others just like it, all waiting to be emptied out themselves, and I didn’t grab it even when he unscrewed the silver top and let the salt spill out into the crater of the sink, my leaky faucet dripping down to wet the granules and turning them into something that resembled the milk-saturated sugar-sludge that was always left at the bottom of a bowl of cereal. 

I did none of this even though I really,  _ really _ wanted to.

Instead, I waited, all nervous anticipation, until the salt was emptied out and Lyle held the shaker out to me, and only then did I take it from him along with the top which I screwed back on before I placed the shaker whose insides were still dusty white from salt in box number two that sat on the counter next to me. 

That box was slated for Goodwill and whatever people might buy what was in it, people who wanted used salt and pepper shakers but who didn’t have the guts or the trauma-induced kleptomania necessary to just steal them like I had. 

Lyle watched me from the corner of his eye and, apparently determining that I wasn’t at risk of losing it or calling a halt to these proceedings entirely, grabbed another shaker from the first box. This one was a squat pink thing shaped vaguely like a pig that I nabbed from some barbecue place at least ten years ago and it caused me a physical spasm in my chest to see its head twisting off and the pepper in it being dumped out, but this was progress, I reminded myself.

I was working through a twelve step program of my own devising. Step one was that I’d stop stealing from other people which – okay, fine, accomplished other than the occasional packets of condiments I still pocketed at restaurants sometimes. Ketchup and mustard and those little square things of sweet and sour sauce they had at McDonald’s that they just gave to you anyway. 

Step two was to get rid of the boxes of crap I’d already stolen – excepting the things that I really needed or didn’t want to get rid of. The salt and pepper shakers were first, because I couldn’t say I needed so many of the things, and Lyle had made noise about how maybe I should donate the mini bottles of lotions and shampoos to a homeless shelter or something when we were done with the shakers, but I wasn’t there yet. 

God only knew what steps three through twelve were. I wasn’t ready for figuring that out quite yet, either, and Lyle wasn’t going to push me to figure it out any sooner than I wanted to. 

Lyle was good like that, though, so it wasn’t much of a surprise, and I appreciated it, really, how he was probably the cat version of a boyfriend – happy to just be around me and get the occasional pets, but otherwise incredibly low-maintenance. 

Lyle rarely made any demands and didn’t act affronted when I asked things of him that any other guy might balk at, like to help me sort through my stolen salt and pepper shaker collection on a Saturday night when we could have been doing literally anything else. He even managed to feed himself – and often me, too – and that put him ahead of a real cat by a few miles.

Diane thought he was a bit of a push-over, but mostly decent, and coming from Diane I guessed that was the highest praise any man could hope for. Unspoken between us that first time I brought Lyle over to meet her was the knowledge that I’d, somehow, done good by nabbing him. 

“Chipper as a squirrel, isn’t he?” Diane had said to me when Lyle excused himself to use her bathroom, her version of saying: a little young for you, isn’t he? But what she hadn’t said was that he was relatively normal compared to my immensely fucked up and that it was very Twilight Zone that a) I was dating him in the first place and b) it was working out fine and c) I was doing the whole normal meet-the-family thing with him even though Diane was pretty much the only family I had that wasn’t still in prison. 

I knew we were both thinking all of it, though, and feeling the dissonance of it vibrating in the gulf between us until Lyle finally came out of Diane’s tiny bathroom and that dissonance just settled into the background, there but comfortably quiet.

That Diane hadn’t said anything more about it all spoke more volumes than anything else, I thought. I got the feeling that Diane was weirded out by Lyle and I, but at the same time she was relieved, like the fact that I was in a seemingly stable relationship was just one more sign that somehow, maybe, against all odds, I would turn out alright after all. That made it easy for her to forgive Lyle for being in his twenties and not being quite able to look her in the eye, and probably sleep a little better at night knowing my chances of winding up dead in a ditch were significantly lower by having a ‘chipper squirrel’ like Lyle watching my back.

At the sink, Lyle handed me the still peppery-smelling pig and I dutifully put its head back on. I held it in my hands for a second, looking down at the painted white ovals of its eyes and the blue dots for pupils in the middle of them and the smile on the thing’s face.

“I’m keeping this one,” I decided just in that moment. I didn’t know why  _ this _ one, I didn’t have any attachment to it any more than I did all the rest, but the idea of someone else having my pepper shaker pig made my throat tight and I suddenly realized I didn’t want that at all.

“Oh?” was all Lyle said, Non-judgmental, vaguely curious. 

“Yeah,” I answered, and carefully set the pig aside, nowhere near the Goodwill box. “It’s got character.”

Lyle peered at the porcelain pig, like maybe he was trying to see whatever character it had, then finally shrugged and said, “I guess it does. I didn’t see a matching one in the box, though.”

“There isn’t one,” I said, and didn’t add that it was because I’d only stolen the one as past me had taken it without thinking and didn’t even realize I had it until I got home and my jacket clunked like something heavy when I took it off and dropped it to the floor. A light bulb went off in my head, however, and I said, “I think there’s a cow.”

Lyle blinked at me, but to his credit didn’t look totally off guard. “A cow?”

“Yeah.” I hopped off the counter and moved around Lyle, brushing against him on my way to reach the box of shakers that had yet to be emptied. I rummaged, glass and porcelain and a little tin clinking together, until finally I pulled out a squat shaker in the same dimensions as the pig, but white and black instead of pink. A smiling cow stared at me, its smile somewhat obscured by dust, and I handed it to Lyle. 

“Huh. A cow,” he said, turning it this way and that, squinting as he inspected it, before he unscrewed the thing’s head off and poured the salt out of it. He then went the extra mile by turning the water on for long enough to wash the dust off its porcelain skin, taking it from a dusty dingy brown to a mostly clean white. He put the cow’s head back on and handed it to me, the thing still wet.

I took it from him carefully with both hands, hoping it didn’t slip from my fingers and break. It didn’t. I put the cow next to the pig and found myself weirdly satisfied by how they didn’t match and yet looked like they kinda did. 

“Cute,” Lyle commented. “Looks like something you’d see on the kitchen table at a farm.”

No, I thought, it really didn’t. 

On my family’s farm, we had two plain plastic shakers – white for salt and black for pepper – that my mom had bought already full in a two-pack and then just refilled over and over again, even though the plastic kind like that were supposed to be disposable. 

We’d never had anything so kitschy like the pig and cow because we couldn’t afford it. My mom would never have spent the money on them even if we could, if we had some rainy day dollars left over to buy little porcelain animals filled with salt and pepper. She would’ve thought it silly, wasteful. She would’ve had a laundry list of things she’d rather spend extra money on, highest among them being actual salt and pepper which the Day family was constantly rationing and running low on regardless of how carefully we went about conserving it.

I didn’t tell Lyle any of that, however. Remembering it was too Darkplace adjacent – not a bad memory but not a good one, either. 

I just said, “I guess it does,” and wondered if maybe step three in my twelve step program should be ‘talk more about my feelings’.

I dismissed the thought almost as soon as I had it. 

I had enough stress figuring out how to let go of my box of pilfered lotion before I could figure out how to talk about my dead family with Lyle as casually as one might go about talking about the weather. 

Baby steps, I thought. One thing at a time.

I made my way back around Lyle and resumed my place at the counter while Lyle resumed emptying out the shakers still remaining in the first box. 

We finished going through the box eventually and when we dropped the now empty shakers at an old, rusted looking Goodwill donation box in the morning, it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would to see them go. 

It would be awhile before I was okay getting rid of my lotion, though. Getting rid of one box of stuff a year seemed like more than enough.


End file.
